2. • Good morning and welcome to Foss4G. I’m Andres Terrazas, CTO of
Thermopylae Sciences and Technology.
• I’m really excited to be here to share the news of GEE going open source
and specifically our journey helping Google bring it to the open source
community
• Thermopylae’s experience with GEE dates back almost to 10 years when
we first started to build uses cases around GEE for our government
customers

3. Let’s start from the top. What exactly is Google Earth Enterprise? We’ve I’ll
heard of Google Earth, but what do I get with this extra “E”? Essentially, GEE
is a collection of tools that help organizations run their own earth globe behind
the firewall and fuse their own imagery assets. GEE is made up of three main
components:
• First, you get Google Earth Enterprise Fusion – Fusion combines all of an
organization’s geospatial data into a flyable globe that is made available to
users via the Google Earth Enterprise Server.
• Fusion can integrate raster data, including imagery and terrain, vector data,
KML, 3D models, and even data stored in traditional models
• To serve the globe you’ll need GEE Server – Server hosts the data and
delivers it to the end user
• Finally, GEE Portable - Portable enables users to access portions of their
custom globes in the field when no network access is available.

4. Well that’s great but how does it all work together?
• Step one is to obtain your data (imagery, vector, or terrain data ) from
various sources and place it on storage accessible to the GEE Fusion
Server
• You select the resources you want to build into your globe by bringing them
into your project
• You kick off your build go grab some coffee, builds can take a while, come
back and bam you have a Google Earth Map or Globe database
• At this point you are ready to publish that globe or map to the GEE Server
for hosting
• You can either access the globe or map directly via a connection from a
GEE client, 3D plugin, or thanks to our friends at AGI the - Cesium WebGL
client, or with any client that supports WMS
• Or you optionally take a cut of the globe you care about by defining a
polygon of interest and download an offline cut
• Once you have the cut in hand you can open the file in Google Earth
Enterprise portable and view it offline. This is an excellent use case for

5. GEE has had some fairly interesting use cases over the years. I’ll highlight some of the use cases from the opengee.org site.
There are some additional videos you can watch if you want to learn more.
Islington
• The London Borough of Islington is London’s second largest borough.
• Islington used GEE as an informational portal to better help communicate spatial data with their citizens.
• Islington was able to visualize city assets such as:
• Traffic assets
• Road markings
• Bus stops
• Trees
• Roads
• Crime layers
• The Islington Public Realm division used GEE to map crime data provided by the police to help their staff ‘design out’ certain
types of crime common to an area.
• With crime layers active in GEE Islington staff could improve lighting or remove foliage that would otherwise be conducive to
specific types of crime.
Virtual Alabama
• Another use case is Virtual Alabama. The state used Virtual Alabama as a visualization system that provided a common
operating picture or COP for the entire state of Alabama.
• It mapped all 67 counties, had over 2100 users, and represented over 550 agencies
• Using Google Earth Enterprise, Virtual Alabama helped the state assemble, display, evaluate and share data with state, county
and municipal governments, including emergency responder teams and law enforcement.
• A great example of this involved using historical imagery after a tornado to allow officials to look at before and after views of
the state to help respond to emergencies
• Using and loading KML layers Virtual Alabama allowed users to view live video feeds
• Virtual Alabama also allowed the public school system to map floor plans of all schools in the state

6. The trajectory of GEE to open source actually started almost 13 years ago
• In 2004, the Keyhole company was acquired by Google and with it came the
Earth product
• In 2005 Google Earth launched and over the next 10 years GEE evolved
bringing with it the Google Earth Plugin, portable, and other features
• In 2015 Google decided that it would deprecate Google Earth Enterprise -
boo
• However after realizing that a large community of GEE users still existed,
especially in the government space, they decided that it was better to open
source and let the community lead it’s direction
• Since 2016 we’ve been working with Google to help them bring GEE to the
open source community
• And after lots of hard work we helped Google release GEE on Github for all
to enjoy – Hooray!

7. The road to open source was not without it’s challenges of course. GEE was a
proprietary product with over 470K lines of code and 17 years running under
closed development:
There were 3 primary concerns
One, changes regarding compilers, build systems, and installers had to be made
Two, unbundling of libraries and specifically removal of proprietaries libs was a
consideraFons
And Three and probably the easiest, was to move to a new configuraFon
management system
My First Template

8. Bring it !

9. • The first decision was to move away from Google’s custom cross-compiler, based on g++ 4.4,
although this allowed code to be compiled once and deployed to multiple Linux environments it
required all the library dependencies to be brought along.
• Instead now OpenGEE code is built on each target system i.e. Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, RHEL/
CentOS 7 using the native g++ compiler
• Overall, this improves the quality of source code and removes any custom Google code
• The Scons build system had to be updated in several places. Libraries are in different places on
different operating systems, RHEL vs. Ubuntu
• The build and packaging process was previously automated, so the scons targets didn’t
necessarily have to be developer friendly.
• As a result, when the automation was removed, there were 5 different scons targets that had to be
called from 4 different directories.
• One of our tasks early on was to simplify this process by consolidating the scons targets to just 2
(build and stage_install targets) from a single directory.
• Due to the open source nature of the project, the proprietary InstallAnywhere software would not
be compatible.
• Ideally, OS level packages would be the ideal path for installation. However, there are still many
libraries that are still bundled with Open GEE, so that is currently impractical.
• As a compromise, bash scripts were written based on the operation of the previous installers.
Thankfully, there was good documentation written by previous Google engineers that detailed the
steps necessary.
• We now have installers and uninstallers for Google Earth Fusion Pro and Server.

10. As part of the open-source effort the team decided that removing as many
proprietary libraries as possible was a good idea
Google internal libraries had to go. For the most part, this was easy to
migrate to open source versions, such as gtes
Qt - Originally used a commercial version of the library. This had to be
migrated to an open source version of the librar
One of the recent contributions to OpenGEE is providing JPEG 2000
support for GDAL. The team unbundled and removed Jpeg2000 support
and instead started using the open source OpenJPEG.
Similar to JPEG2000, MrSID support was provided via the Lizardtech library.
Currently we’ve only known MrSID to be available as a proprietary library.
However, users can probably get a license to the SDK and compile GDAL
themselves. We believe at this point that a read-only license is available for
free.

11. Moved to GIT from Keyhole’s source control Piper Perforce tool
And finally
Migrate away from Google’s CM system to GitHub

12. This all sounds great but why do I care. Well there are various benefits of
GEE going open source and here are some:
• Continuous support – GEE can now be supported by the open source
community. For customers who thought that GEE would be a dead
technology can now continue using it knowing the community will support it.
• Quadtree Spec – The quad-tree spec is the internal spec for organizing an
calling tiles in GEE. The quad-tree expanded upon in the open source.
• Low barriers to entry (A suite of tools that a couple of years ago costs tens
of thousands of dollars is now freely available). A GIS product that maybe
was cost prohibitive for smaller companies, state/local agencies, and non-
profits is now available.
• New features are possible as the community needs them.
• Flexibility to embed in other systems. Now with the code open sourced
embedding components i.e. portable is a possibility
• Automation of processes. With the source code available and extensible
ways to expose APIs and automate processes i.e. fusion of imagery is now
a reality

13. Communication
Slack
• We needed a way to communicate with our community so we deiced to use a tool that we
already use internally to communicate amongst ourselves .
• For group collaboration we use Slack. We make a conscious effort to invite people to slack.
• Anytime someone has an issue we extend the link to them so that they can join as well.
FAQ
• At the beginning of the project we were dealing with creating installers and testing on various
platforms. In addition, the tutorial documents were a little out of date with the current state of the
project.
• We realized an FAQ page would be very helpful in handling the same questions that kept popping
up. We’ve found it very useful for providing quick responses (which we just mentioned was
important) and addressing complex topics in a concise manner.
• This is one of those organic things that grew out of working with the community.
Responsiveness
• There may be no well defined roadmap on how to make a successful open source project but one
way to definitely kill one is to not be responsive.
• We’ve made this a big focus and try to respond to questions on Slack and Issues in Github every
day.
• Alex, our Community Manager does a sweep every morning and afternoon and makes the team
aware of any issues that have not seen any response. We firmly believe this helps show that we
are an active and supportive community for both developers and users.
Measuring Progress
• We’re are using GitHub’s built in graphs and Pulse to start tracking metrics. Had to determine
what Metrics are important to track. Decided on splitting them into three categories:
• Discovery
• Views
• Usage
• Clone and forks
• Retention
• Contributions
• Repeat contributors

14. Challenges
GEE is not without it’s challenges. The NPAPI 3D plugin is being phased out
by modern so having a transition plan for 3D support is essential
3D API
Luckily, the community has already responded with Cesium providing support
for OpenGEE
3D Tile Spec
More support for 3D rendering is something we seriously looking at, especially
the glTF 3D Tile Spec already supported by Cesium.
Fusion Clustering
Speeding up the fusion process is something atop of our list of things to do.
Multi-threading processes and Fusion clustering is something we are looking
at currently. Maybe supporting Fusion in the cloud could be an option

15. Lots of great things to happening with OpenGEE and we encourage you to
come join us.
• If you want to get involved please start by going to opengee.org. There
you’ll find a lot of information, news, and a blog about the project.
• From there you’ll want to head over to the github project @google/
enterprise/
Like I mentioned earlier we keep a very active slack channel at
slack.opengee.org so if you curious or have questions about how to work or
contribute to OpenGEE please jump on.
• Finally shoot is email if you any particular questions or join the google group

16. • That’s it for me now I’ll open it for any questions.
• I’ve brought some our OpenGEE team along to help answer any questions
you might have.
• Alex Hernandez is our Community Manager and Chris Camp is our Lead
Engineer. These are the two guys with the master plan so if you have juicy
questions about the internals of GEE these are your guys
Questions?
Ok, finally if you see us around please come by and say hello. We’d love to
chat with you guys
Thank you very much and see you on slack